Video: Working with 3D

In Photoshop CS5, there have been and enormous amount of enhancements, inside of the 3D features of Photoshop Extended and I'm going to show you, this on this object that I created with AdobeUNKNOWN. Which is, in effect, a 3D object. If we go here to the layers panel, we see that this is, in fact, a 3D layer. But of course all the operations I'm going to be doing now, you can do with any 3D object you import into Photoshop.

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Working with 3D

In Photoshop CS5, there have been and enormous amount of enhancements, inside of the 3D features of Photoshop Extended and I'm going to show you, this on this object that I created with AdobeUNKNOWN. Which is, in effect, a 3D object. If we go here to the layers panel, we see that this is, in fact, a 3D layer. But of course all the operations I'm going to be doing now, you can do with any 3D object you import into Photoshop.

And we will be seeing more and more 3D inside of Photoshop, especially for works that involve furniture, for example, or cars. I mean, it costs so much to go out and take those pictures. And it's so much easier to actually use 3D objects inside of a Photoshop image. So let's look at this question mark, and as I said this question mark is a 3D object that I created with Adobe Repousse which is also a new feature in Photoshop CS5. So let's select this 3D layer. And what we have here in the 3D workspace is the possibility to actually work with that 3D layer.

And there is a few things that I want to show you. 1 that I really enjoy is that, finally, we can have shadows cast from the object onto the ground. So let's see how that works. Let's go in here into my object. Okay, like this. And with my 3D tool, which I can use of course to move my object around, okay, exactly like I want it to be positioned on the image. And then, down here under the 3D scene panel I can actually turn on several things.

For example, the ground plane. And the ground plane now is on top of this Bay area here. And my object is above it. As a matter of fact, I can change the angle of the object, but also the angle of the ground plane by using my camera rotation tools. So if we take the camera rotation tool here, you see that I can actually very precisely place that grid on the bay area down here. Okay, let's move back to my 3D tools. And what I want to do now is to cast shadows.

But before I can actually cast shadows, there's some things I have to turn on. For example, the render settings. So I'm going to edit those, and make sure that shadows is turned on in these render settings. The solid face style, okay? Let's say okay to this. And then I'm going to move over to my lights because here I can ask my lights to create shadows. And I can also define the softness of those shadows. Zero is very hard and if you go all the way to 100%, its very, very soft. Let's choose something like maybe, ten percent, because this object is not very far from the ground plain.

Okay. At that point, I will be back to my 3d menu, and I will actually tell Photoshop to activate the ground plane shadow catcher. Okay? This is the option that we have to choose in the 3d menu. Actually, I just selected it, so let's reselect it, okay? Photoshop will tell me. That the shadows on the plane Shadow Catcher will only be visible for ray traced render quality settings. Okay, so how do we do that? Let's move back to our whole scene here, and change the quality from interactive, which is very good to actually move object, 3D objects around In my image, two ray-traced. And let's start with ray-traced draft.

Because ray-traced final would be even more precise, okay? So let's make a draft first and as you can see, the ray-tracing engine has already started. To cast shadows inside of that shape. Okay? Depending on where the lights are. You can stop that rate tracing at any time, just by pressing the space bar. And go back to your 3D scene. It's actually put the quality back to interactive for a second, so we can work on this a little bit more. And, I'm going to choose the tool that allows me to move the lights around which is this one, okay? And if I go down here by this little icon, I can also ask Photoshop to show me the 3D lights.

At that point we don't need the ground plane anymore because we now know where it is, but this allows me to very, very quickly decide where my lights come from. These are ambient lights, so I can place exactly, and have maybe, the object cast two shadows in that case. Let's make it, go away a little bit further, okay? And at any point, and this is something that we could do also in Photoshop CS4, We can add lights to that scene but let's keep those to ambient lights, they're called actually infinite lights.

So when I select them we see that this is an infinite light and this is another infinite light, okay? And I can change also their intensity here, even their color. Let's move back to the entire scene and put the quality back to ray traced draft. Now, the lights will be recalculated and you can see that Photoshop is now creating two shadows for me, one here and one here. And this is now possible Because we have that new Ray Trace engine, inside of Photoshop CS5 Extended.

There's other things that I want to show you here, on that object. And pressing the space bar, to actually stop the ray tracing, and we go back to interactive so that it doesn't redraw every time I make a change. And what I want to show you now is another thing. I'm going to turn off the 3D lights and go back to my scene here. And now what I want to show you is another thing that I can do with these 3D tools in Photoshop. For example, if I choose my 3D zoom camera tool down here. Up here in the control panel I can actually define depth of field blur, Okay? So that things that are in the front may be sharp and crisp, and things in the background may blur out, so that we have the illusion of that object actually being out of focus. Let's turn this depth of field blur on a second and see how that works. Let's make it one.

Okay, you can already see that the result on the object itself. But the other thing that we also need to do is tell that object where the focus is. So we can do that by pressing down the ALT key. And clicking on the object itself. And then maybe going here and change the distance, Okay, so that the depth of field only applies after a certain distance, Okay? You see that the front is very sharp and then it goes out into a blur. And now we can do the same thing again.

Let's do the retrace draft and see how that looks. And we can now see our object building, our shadows building here and the depth of field being applied to that object. Let's press the space bar and stop that and come back to our 3D discussion here. So, what these new technologies allow us to do is to truly work with 3D inside of Photoshop. The enhancements like for example this shadow catcher and the fact that we can now work with Adobe Repousse, extruding text and path and layer masks and selections makes Photoshop a truly good application to work with 3D, because we have all the tools that are necessary to put these 3D images Into a 2D scene, such as this one, and make it look realistic.

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